On October 22, 2022, the General State Intervention (IGAE), overseen by the Ministry of Finance, last published its semiannual statistics on the degree of execution of territorially allocated investments by the State across the 17 autonomous communities. That report showed the territorial execution of real investments up to June 30, 2022. By mid-year, the State had only completed about a quarter of the more than 21 billion euros planned for the entire year 2022.
After that, a statistical blackout occurred. The Ministry of Finance website has not published any of the two semiannual reports promised in the official statistics calendar for 2023 (May 30 and September 29).
Furthermore, remarkably, the 2024 Annual Program of the National Statistical Plan 2021-2024, published on January 24 in the Official State Bulletin, ends the semiannual diffusion of data and establishes that there will only be a single annual report (relating to 2023) to be published next December. There will no longer be diffusion of territorialized investment data for the entire General State Administration (AGE) and its public companies. The data will be published only for the entities within the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility (Mitram), which concentrates the most territorially allocated investment, though other departments such as Ecological Transition also play a relevant role in the regional distribution of funds.
Additionally, the draft royal decree approving the National Statistical Plan 2025-2028, now in the public consultation phase, establishes for the next four years a new criterion: a single annual publication with only territorialized data from the Transport Ministry and its public companies, such as Renfe and Adif.
The question then becomes what will happen to the obligation of the General Budget Law, Article 135, which requires the IGAE to inform semestrally the Budgetary Office of the Congress of Deputies about the degree of execution of real investment by the State public sector in each autonomous community. According to congressional sources, in 2023 the Ministry did not contribute any information beyond what appeared on the Ministry’s website; in other words, there was no additional data, since the last entry on the site dates back to October 22, 2022.
First noncompliance: May 30
The previous year, the Ministry failed to honor the planned commitment to publish by May 30 the data on the execution of the State’s budgeted investment across all autonomous communities for the year 2022. By May 30, 2023, the country was digesting the results of municipal and regional elections held two days earlier, on May 28. Perhaps this influenced the Ministry of Finance’s decision not to publish data that could complicate post-electoral coalition negotiations for governing regional and local authorities.
Budget execution data reveal which communities saw the Government meet or exceed planned investment and where the targets fell short, sometimes dramatically. Such data can become political ammunition for territories challenging the central administration, especially when performance is unfavorable.
For example, in Catalonia the State executed only about a third of its budgeted investment for 2021, the latest year with complete data; in Madrid, figures nearly doubled the budgeted amount. The national average for all communities hovered around 67.1% of the planned investment. In Catalonia, Asturias, Andalusia, and the Valencian Community, execution remained below 50%, while in Aragón, La Rioja, Castilla-La Mancha, and Madrid, the figure surpassed 100%. An analysis by the Generalitat notes that Catalonia’s investment execution from 2015 to 2021 stood at an average of 62%, below the overall regional average (in 2021 it was only 35.7% in Catalonia, 31 points below the national average of 67.1%).
According to a report from the Generalitat’s Department of Economy based on IGAE data, since 2010 Catalonia has seen 49.6% of its allocated national budgets for Adif and Renfe not executed. The calculation pushes up to 3.639 billion euros the total unexecuted in the last 13 years and fuels Catalonia’s push for transfer of railway competencies, including Rodalies, now under review.
Second noncompliance: September 29
On September 29 another statistical blackout occurred. Contrary to the calendar on the Ministry of Finance site, the semiannual report on the territorialized investment execution for the full year 2022 was not published that day.
There was also a demand from the autonomous communities. In July, the Generalitat de Catalunya’s economics secretary Natàlia Mas complained about the low execution rates and urged Finance Minister María Jesús Montero to publish the 2022 data. Mas has repeated the appeal in public interventions. The department maintains that Finance is failing to comply with the regulations.
That same September 29, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, then a presidential candidate, lost a second vote on his investiture, paving the way for Pedro Sánchez to build parliamentary support for his candidacy. This coincidence may have influenced Finance’s reluctance to publish statistics that could complicate the negotiations with pro-independence, nationalist, and regional parties for Sánchez’s investiture.
In discussions with ERC, the PSOE agreed to establish a commission on investments between the Generalitat and the State to agree on prioritization, planning, and monitoring and execution. On January 15, the Generalitat announced the creation of the new Comitè Estratègic d’Inversions to identify priority projects for the State in Catalonia to correct its historical investment deficit, including administrative delegations to Catalan authorities for selected projects such as the B-40, Vallès rail interchanges, the N-2, the N-260, and new priorities yet to be decided. For now, the Government’s plan announced on February 22, 2024, states that data for 2022 and the first half of 2023 will not be released until December, due to the ongoing information blackout.
In sum, as of February 22, 2024, the data for the 2022 investment execution and the first half of 2023 remain unavailable; the statistical plan foresees no new data releases before December of this year, raising questions about compliance with transparency laws and the practical implications for regional governance and fiscal planning.